Excellent article sur le loyalisme
Thursday 28 March 2013
Lowering the flag on old-fashioned Ulster loyalism
Working-class loyalists are the only constituency in Northern Ireland to have shunned the therapeutic ideas and language of the peace process – and they’re being punished for it.
Kevin Rooney

My first experience of Ulster loyalism was a vivid one. I was seven years old, the third-youngest child in a Catholic family of 10 children living in East Belfast, a predominantly Protestant area. In the early hours of one morning in August 1971, I was woken up by shouting and screaming. I rushed out of the house in my underpants, along with my brothers and sisters. Outside was a crowd of several hundred loyalists waving Union flags and shouting anti-Catholic obscenities at us. As we were driven off at speed, they cheered in celebration. That was the last time I would ever see the inside of my home.

When I awoke the next morning, in the ‘refugee centre’, I learned that several hundred Catholic families had also been driven from their homes that same night by loyalist mobs in a mass pogrom. Within a week, the number was thousands and history now records that it became tens of thousands. Though we lost our house and most of our belongings, we were fortunate that we escaped alive and unharmed. Not all Catholic families were that lucky.

I was reminded of that fateful night by recent loyalist protests against the removal of the Union flag from Belfast City Hall. At first glance, the loyalist crowds outside City Hall may have looked similar to the baying mob that drove my family out of our home. But on reflection, they’re clearly very different. Unlike in a previous era, Northern Irish loyalists no longer appear confident and superior. Compared with the days of the Ulster Workers’ Strike of 1974, or the huge loyalist demonstrations against the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s, the loyalist protests over the Union flag have been very small affairs.

Struggling to articulate what they stand for, the flag protesters are frustrated and fragmented. The flag protests look more like a lashing out at what they have lost than an expression of loyalists’ former supremacy.

The things loyalists once held dear – Britishness, the monarchy, anti-Catholicism – no longer mean much to the British establishment, which has found new ways to maintain its rule in Ireland. With the IRA’s armed struggle long since abandoned, Sinn Fein has been drawn into the peace process via the Good Friday Agreement signed in April 1998; these republicans have signed up to a new, reformed six-county state. The reward for this compromise has been increasing material equality for Catholics and ‘parity of esteem’ in terms of identity politics and symbols – hence the restrictions on the flying of the Union flag.

Many working-class loyalists, however, have never really accepted the peace process and view it as Sinn Fein and republicans waging war by other means. Watching Sinn Fein becoming the largest party on Belfast City Council was bad enough for loyalists; seeing Sinn Fein successfully have the Union flag removed from City Hall was too much to take.

While some commentators think the distinction between ‘loyalism’ and ‘Unionism’ revolves around attitudes to violence, class was and is a much more significant aspect. Loyalist paramilitaries are deeply rooted in the poorest sections of the Protestant working class. Writing in the February edition of the London Review of Books, Colin Kidd was right to point out that loyalism has been an underappreciated expression of Protestant working-class consciousness. Today, the resentment of young working-class loyalists towards middle–class Unionists in their leafy suburbs is palpable, and is part of what makes up the siege mentality on display in the flags protest. Loyalists increasingly view Unionist politicians in the same way they view Catholics, the cross-community Alliance Party and British politicians: as untrustworthy enemies.

The flag protests reveal a group of people who feel abandoned and betrayed by British rulers in London. They feel their British identity is being diluted. Each concession to Irish nationalists and republicans, real or perceived, is interpreted as another nail in the coffin of loyalists’ Britishness. As if to confirm their worse suspicions, it is clear that the young loyalists fighting for the Union flag and the crown are viewed with nothing but derision and contempt by British politicians. Where once they served a useful purpose in Britain’s fight against the IRA, militant loyalists are now surplus to requirements.

One of the most interesting dynamics within loyalism is not just the sense of alienation from British politicians in Westminster and Unionist politicians in Stormont, but the growing intergenerational tensions within working-class loyalism itself. A new, more uncompromising breed of young men, like Jamie Bryson, has emerged to lead the flag protests. It seems the older leaders of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) can no longer take for granted their leadership role, as younger, more militant protesters accuse the older generation of going soft.

These developments raise some serious questions. What is happening within loyalism? Where does it go from here? Does loyalism have any future? Though written before the flag dispute, Peter Shirlow’s The End Of Ulster Loyalism? is a valiant attempt to answer these questions, and a fascinating analysis of loyalism in peacetime.

Shirlow explains in the introduction that he wants to challenge reductionist theories that stereotype all loyalists as unreconstructed sectarian hardliners. He begins by distinguishing between what he describes as positive loyalism and regressive loyalism. He paints an ugly picture of loyalism in its heyday, outlining the widespread scale and indiscriminate nature of loyalist murders of Catholics and the extent of collusion that took place between loyalist paramilitaries and the British security services.

But by far the most interesting part of the book is Shirlow’s argument that there is another, more constructive loyalism emerging that is not receiving due attention. ‘The consumption of loyalists is driven by a tabloid media to such an extent that the signs of progressive changes have been submerged’, he writes.

Shirlow does not dispute the existence of loyalist hardliners; but he distinguishes between the ‘idiocy’ of rejectionist loyalism and an avant garde of ‘progressive’ or ‘transitional’ loyalism willing to work with ideas of conflict resolution and to engage Catholics as equals. Contrary to received wisdom, he argues, it has always been sections of working-class loyalism that have experimented in creative ways, offering an olive branch to nationalists long before middle-class Unionists did. Throughout the book, leading loyalist figures like Jackie McDonald, Billy Hutchinson and the late David Irvine are held up as intelligent, interesting and deliberately misunderstood. In Shirlow’s view, these men have been ‘fundamentally far more ahead of Unionism, in terms of the exploration for accommodation’.

Shirlow is a big fan of the various conflict-transformation initiatives that leading loyalist figures are engaging in, and dismisses those within loyalism who object as ‘spoilers and wreckers’. He presents a sophisticated and positive analysis of the various programmes of conflict amelioration and peace-building strategies – but sadly, he fails to subject them to the kind of critical questioning that is surely called for. He is unwavering in his praise for ‘conflict resolution’ and the people engaged in it.

But I would challenge his assumption that the loyalist working class has engineered and devised conflict-resolution initiatives. It is much more the case that the politics of conflict resolution are being imposed from without on an ideologically exhausted loyalism. While working-class loyalists are indeed involved in the process of what gets called ‘conflict resolution’, that fact should not disguise that this is really a top-down initiative rather than bottom-up one.

What is striking about conflict-resolution initiatives is the number of so-called experts called upon to facilitate them, including therapists, psychologists, academics and the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council. This is far from being a local, organic initiative.

For all their faults, the one thing that loyalist leaders were always good at in the past was a bit of straight talking. But the leaders Shirlow wants us to admire increasingly talk a new language, picked up from conflict-resolution experts, which deploys all the ambiguous jargon of the peace process. In my view, this deliberately vague language partly explains why some younger loyalists are now looking to more blunt leaders like Jamie Bryson, who expresses political convictions in a much more forthright way.

In the past year, I have attended two separate political debates in Belfast where older loyalist figures spoke. With their talk of ‘parity of esteem’, ‘decoding the allure of violence’, ‘hybrid identities’ and references to theorists like Jürgen Habermas, they were unrecognisable from the straight-talking individuals of old. It may have taken a few years longer than Sinn Fein, but the loyalist old guard now also talks in the language of the peace process – a language, it seems, that is alienating loyalist leaders from their old grassroots support.

While many, including Shirlow, see what is happening in loyalism today as a bold move to embrace the peace process, I see it differently. Ulster loyalism is a dramatically weakened force that has been dragged, kicking and screaming, towards embracing the peace process. Far from ‘selling out’, as some loyalists accuse their leaders of doing, in many ways the loyalist leaderships’ accommodation to the latest phase of British rule in Ireland is consistent with the history of their movement. When Britain needed an aggressive, supremacist majority to guarantee British rule, loyalists played that role with gusto. Now Britain needs loyalists to behave differently in order to secure the status quo; it needs them to adopt the therapeutic language of accommodation and respect for diversity. The loyalists who ignore the new script and refuse to adapt to their old ally’s new demands will find that their devotion to the British state cuts little ice. No wonder commentators report a sense of betrayal and disorientation among the flags protesters.

Shirlow writes: ‘The future of loyalism is dependent upon support from state agencies and other funders in order to maintain key interventionist work.’ Wow – how the mighty have fallen!

Article EXCELLENTISIME icihttp://www.paulinehadaway.co.uk/?p=5
Speaking in the wake of last month’s tragic spate of suicides in north Belfast, Irish President Mary McAleese blamed the peace process for failing young people in Northern Ireland, parts of which, she said, remained ‘stuck in a time warp’ of sectarianism and paramilitarism, where, in the context of rising prosperity across Ireland, levels of poverty were often ‘worse than during the Troubles’.Working class areas like Ardoyne and Tigers Bay may bear the brunt of sectarianism, paramilitary punishment squads and economic failure, but are they uniquely ‘stuck in a time warp’? Just hours before the funeral of 18 year old Bernard Cairns, north Belfast’s 13th suicide victim of 2004, nominees and representatives of Northern Ireland’s main political parties sat down together at a public consultation in Belfast’s King’s Hall, to consider the future of HMP Maze. As the NI Prison Service prepares to hand over land and buildings to the office of the first and deputy first minister, Sinn Fein put its case for the old H-blocks to be preserved as a museum, while the DUP’s representative on the Maze consultation panel, suggested a museum should not be the over-riding consideration, observing that the site provided an opportunity ‘to build for the future’. PUP representative David Ervine, sympathetic to local unionist concerns that the site may become a ‘shrine’ to republican hunger strikers, later commented that the old prison simply be leveled to the ground. The British government meanwhile is conducting a feasibility study into the viability of a national sports stadium.

While politicians clearly have an important role to play in planning what is best for the region’s future, discussions around the future of the Maze, affected by conflicting interpretations of the site’s historical meaning, inevitably founder amidst diametrically opposed and seemingly irreconcilable views of its place in history. In other words, development plans for the 360 acre site are not only subject to normal economic and planning constraints, but even at the level of imagining future potential, the significance of the past will always be a determining factor. Of course, the residue of the North’s troubled past is visible everywhere, not least in the proliferation of walls, compounds and military installations, which disfigure the landscape, denoting Northern Ireland’s historic failure to function as a modern democratic state. In this sense the dialogue between past and present is not only inescapable, but meaningful and relevant, as ideas for building a better future may be continually informed and measured against what is known and to a large extent still experienced of the past. In the forward tide of lived experience, where solutions flow from interpretation, so the past must always remain open to interrogation and revision. Nevertheless questions remain as to why, in a chronically underdeveloped region, crying out for more jobs, better transport and social provision, so much discussion, imagination and financial resource are being invested in endlessly revisiting and memorialising traumas of the recent past. Expressed through structures and processes of commemoration, memorial and inquiry, almost every aspect of public life in the north is increasingly informed by the quest to establish a consensus on history, to as it were fix a formally agreed set of meanings and, somehow sort out yesterday’s problems, tomorrow.

From its inception the Belfast Agreement has placed disputes around interpretations of history at the centre of contemporary political life in the North, as in 1998 British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, announced his government’s intention to set up a judicial inquiry into Bloody Sunday. Beyond seeking some point of agreement on the facts, the aim of the inquiry, stated in Blair’s 1998 parliamentary address, was to ‘establish the truth about what happened that day’ (my italics); not for the straightforward purpose of either laying charges against, or clearing the names of, individuals and institutions, nor to open up a war of ideas, public analysis and debate, but in pursuit of consensus and reconciliation as the basis for ‘building a secure future for the people of Northern Ireland’. Five years and £127 million pounds later, as the journey from truth to reconciliation appears increasingly fraught and uncertain, one thing at least is clear: historical truth is not neatly pinned down, nor can it easily be measured against immoveable standards of judgement, fixed in the here and now. 14 people died after British paratroopers opened fire on demonstrators in Derry on 30th January 1972. That much is certain. Some argue that the Paratroopers acted criminally, others that they acted as they did because they believed their standing orders justified it. For republicans, Bloody Sunday was simply an inevitable consequence of British policy in Ireland, a policy of military containment, which later sanctioned state sponsored assassination, covertly through collusion with paramilitary groups or openly through a policy of ‘shoot to kill’.

Whatever your politics, it is hardly unreasonable to acknowledge that Bloody Sunday took place within an historical and political context. For friends and families of the dead, Bloody Sunday, no less than Bloody Friday, La Mon or Enniskillen, will always remain a tragic and painful reality. The rest of us, untouched by private anger and pain, having no authentic claim to victimhood, must ultimately recognise these acts of violence as matters of historical fact. How we understand, interpret or ultimately respond to these facts, entirely depends on our politics, how we view the society we live in and the kind of future we desire.

Interpretations of the past are continually shaped in the arena of political action and debate. As society sets new goals and standards, so the judgement of history is always reserved in the light of things still unknown or yet to come. Post conflict, as institutions of the state reorganise and re-present themselves, arguments around events like Bloody Sunday remain profoundly significant in the contribution they can make towards deeper analysis and understanding of the new political landscapes. However, these arguments belong outside fixed terms of reference, in the realm of live public debate, where meaning may continuously be challenged and subject to scrutiny. Institutionalising questions of historic legitimacy within the North’s political structures simply promotes a process of never ending dispute and political stalemate. Furthermore, in mediating between institutions and their detractors or victims, the formal judicial inquiry may actually undermine democracy, sidelining real public debate and shifting political power from the electorate and those they mandate into the hands of un-elected, supposedly neutral, referees. Far from challenging the state and its institutions, judicial inquiry opens up new points of contact between the state and an increasingly marginalized public.

On 14th July 1789 the citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille, hated symbol of the despotism and oppression of the ancien regime. Within two days of its fall, the National Assembly ordered that the prison be razed to the ground, so the people might rejoice that ‘grass grew where the Bastille stood’. Post conflict Belfast is a long way from revolutionary France and perhaps in these uncertain times it might be better to reserve judgement on the ‘future of the Maze’, turning our minds instead to the project of building a better future for all of us who remain in its shadow.